Family Honor
Looking down on a clear day from a bald on Dug Down Mountain you can see the valley far below. The bald is sometimes called the sods—where the trees can’t grow because of high winds. This particular spot is called Foley Sods after the Foleys who have lived here in the Dug Down Mountains for generations. Looking closer from the high, green bald you can see far below in the edge of a dilapidated orchard a lorn grave. Overrun with ivy and thorns it is enclosed with a wire fence, sagging and rusty and held together here and there with crooked sticks and broken staves.
Ben Foley’s grave it is, anyone whom you happen to meet along the way will tell you, but your informant will say no more. If you have the time and inclination to follow the footpath on around toward a cliff to the right you may come upon old Jorde Foley sitting near on a log as if keeping watch over the place. The old fellow will appraise you from head to foot and either he will be glum, like the person you have passed on the way, or he will invite you to rest a while. Then presently he falls into easy conversation and before you are aware you have learned much about Ben and Jorde Foley too.
It wasn’t that Jorde had any objection to what Ben, his son, was doing, but it was the things that happened when Ben brought home his bride from Cartersville that caused Jorde to speak his mind. This day he went back to the beginning of things.
“I’ve been makin’ all my life right here in these Dug Down Mountains alongside this clift,” he said. “It’s my land, my crop. And I’ve a right to do with my corn whatever I’m a mind to. And Cynthie, my wife, many’s the time she taken turns with me breakin’ up the mash, packin’ the wood to keep the fire under the still. We’ve set by waitin’ for the run off. And Ben, our boy, he learnt from watchin’ us how to make good whiskey, from the time he was a little codger. Sometimes Cynthie would keep an eye out for the law. But we hated that part of it worser’n pizen. We were in our rights and had no call to be treated like thieves in the night. Pa made whiskey right here in these Dug Down Mountains same as his’n before him, out of corn he raised on his own place and in them days there wasn’t ever the spyin’ eyes of the law snoopin’ around.” Jorde rolled his walking staff between his rough hands and looked away. “Sometimes I’d change places with Cynthie whilst she tended the fire. We made good whiskey,” he said neither boastfully nor modestly. “We sold it for an honest price. That’s the way we learnt Ben to do. But, hi crackies, what takes my hide and taller is when a son o’ mine turns out yaller. I never raised my boy for no chicanery.” Old Jorde’s voice raised in indignation. However, when he spoke again there was a note of tolerance even pity in his tone.
“Ben would never ’a’ done it only for that Jezebel he married down to Cartersville and brought home here to the mountains. Effie, like Delilah that made mock of her man Samson, was the cause of it all. Ben just nat’erly couldn’t make whiskey fast enough to give that woman all her cravin’s and now you see where it got my poor boy. A man’s a right,” said the old fellow in deadly earnest, “to marry a girl he’s growed up with—stead of tryin’ to get above his raisin’. See where it got my poor boy,” he repeated. The troubled eyes sought the neglected grave in the scrubby orchard far below.
There was no marker, not even a rough stone from the mountain side at head or foot like on the other Foley graves in the Foley burying ground on the brow of the hill. Only the sagging fence enclosed Ben’s resting place. “It was hard to do,” old Jorde said grimly, “but it had to be so’s no other Foley will follow Ben’s course.”
With that he slowly arose and led the way to a pile of soot-covered stones.
“Now close here was where the thumpin’ keg stood,” he began to indicate positions, “and yonder the still.”